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Alexander Technique

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Is it me … or the chair?

Adjusting or upgrading our chair can really
make a difference to our comfort and pain levels. The same goes for the desk, bicycle or backpack we use. In
this post, I explain what Alexander Technique teachers say about our chairs.
But first, here’s a short story to illustrate that great equipment is only part
of the solution - how we use it is equally, if not more, important.

How my
friend sits over a meal

I have just had lunch with a 65 year old, who
I haven’t seen for a long time. As we met, this tall man walked towards me with
a distinct stoop, his head forward but craned up. 20 years ago, he stood proud.

Over our meal, he chose to sit on a soft
cushiony bench seat, instead of an upright chair. He slumped appallingly,
saying this was his preferred type of seat. His lower back was strained, his
chest compressed, and his neck pulled back tightly. He sat like this for nearly
an hour as we ate. (I didn’t know him well enough to gently tell him!)

Can you picture how he sat? It is his mental
picture of himself that is most at fault here.

What
is wrong with his thinking?

He feels most comfortable when his spine is
constantly in tension, and is in fact shortening. He has no intuitive sense of
lengthening and broadening his whole torso, so that the limbs move freely and
the head is balanced on top of the spine

His body map is telling him “instinctively”
that the right places to bend are in the lower back and base of the neck. If
only he understood that the hip joints are much lower, and that the spine meets the head very high up
– as I explain in earlier blogposts. The most critical point to understand here is
about alignment of mental image and body mechanics. If your mental picture of
how your body works is wrong, it will continually struggle to obey this faulty
picture.

The pose adopted by the ‘thinker’ pictured to
the right shows us graphically how our body and mind are a unity.

Does the chair, table height or back pack
matter?

Yes, they do. We’re not all the same. There is a huge
variation in body height and length of our limbs. Furthermore, habits vary from
one person to the next. Uniformly designed furniture does not suit all our
needs. Our patterns of chair use build up over many
years. Alexander teacher Richard Brennan has campaigned for years to ban
backward-sloping chairs from schools in Ireland – see http://www.alexander.ie/chairscampaign.html.
He points out that the National Back Pain Association in Britain reported that
such school chairs are a major cause of back pain in adults.

Professor Galen Cranz is both a design expert
and an Alexander Teacher. She has written a book about the chair in human
culture. In a short powerful article available on-line (Cranz 2000), Prof Cranz
uses illustrations to highlight the effect on our bodies of different sitting
positions and chair design. She shows how efforts by chair designers to solve
one problem affecting the head, pelvis, hips and spine have only led to others.
She makes impressive statements about ‘the inherent instability of the seated
posture’ but balances this by criticising a cultural assumption that it is ‘too
tiring to sit upright without support’.

Prof Cranz emphasises five principles from
Alexander Technique and relates these to problems with the chair and how we sit
– the statement I like best under the first principle is : ‘disorganisation at
the head-neck joint will ricochet throughout the body’. The next four
principles cover : recognising the force of habit; acknowledging the subjective
nature of what feels good; the power of simple thoughts (based on a scientific
understanding) to guide our movement; and finally saying no to our old habits.

In summaryHow you use the equipment around you is
critical. Helping people address their ingrained habits is the key contribution
of Alexander Technique to our well-being. Not everyone can tilt their chair
forwards, adjust their desk height, or buy a new backpack. But getting the
right gear is also important.

References

Galen Cranz (2000) The Alexander Technique in
the world of design: posture and the common chair Part I: the chair as health
hazard. Journal of
Bodywork and Movement Therapies. Vol 4; Part 2, pp.90-98. (available http://alexandertechnique.com/resources/JBMT-alex.pdf).

1 comment:

I especially like the bit "It is his mental picture of himself that is most at fault here." It has been my experience (both with myself and with my pupils) that self-image is mirrored to a T in our bodies. We seem compelled to believe that we must go down with gravity as we get older. How refreshing it is to see older folks going up with gravity! Gives us all hope!